Canada in Afghanistan: assessing the costs

Daryl Copeland, a former Canadian diplomat, is an educator, analyst, consultant, and the author of Guerrilla Diplomacy: Rethinking International Relations. He is a Senior Fellow at the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute, and holds teaching appointments at Ottawa, East Anglia (UK – London Academy of Diplomacy) and Otago (NZ) Universities. For more information and commentary, visit his website, and read the book’s introduction.

Last weekend, as I participated in a conference entitled Armed Intervention: Lessons from Afghanistan, the U.S. reported its 2000th military death in that long-running conflict. Although the exact circumstances remain rather murky, the killing was apparently the result of an Afghan recruit turning upon his ISAF trainers.

Like so much else about the Afghan conflict, NATO’s exit strategy is not going according to script.

In remarks prepared for the conference, I observed that Canada has been intensely engaged in Afghanistan – mainly militarily, but also as a substantial aid donor and to some extent diplomatically – almost continuously for more than a decade. Something approaching $30 billion has been expended on the war, some 160 lives have been lost, and perhaps ten times that number of soldiers have been seriously injured or wounded. Of the approximately 40,000 Canadian soldiers who have served in Afghanistan, more than 10% have returned home suffering from PTSD, or from related mental health issues.

In addressing these questions, it becomes clear that many of the most important issues have not yet received the attention they deserve.

Forsaken gains

Insurgencies are notoriously difficult to counter. In that respect, I believe that NATO’s essential strategic misjudgment was the failure to recognize that most achievable objectives – dismantling the Al-Qaeda network, scattering its leadership and removing the Taliban from power – had been realized by early 2003. That error is looking increasingly irrecoverable, especially in the wake of rising civilian casualties (collateral damage), rogue killings of women and children, epidemic government corruption, failed elections and a persistently bad economy.

Widely publicized incidents such as Koran burnings, urinating on dead insurgents and posing with severed body parts have done for Afghanistan what Abu Ghraib did for Iraq. Foreign forces are now seen as occupiers rather than liberators, and have become an integral part of the problem rather than the solution.

Meanwhile, a host of regional players with competing, and largely divergent interests – Pakistan, Iran, India – are waiting anxiously in the wings, eager to intensify their engagement in the vacuum which will follow ISAF’s drawdown 2013-14. Western intervention has contributed to state failure, and persistent instability is poised to emerge as a hallmark of the ISAF mission.

Domestic damage

Insufficient attention has been devoted to an estimation of the internal and opportunity costs associated with Canada’s lengthy international policy pre-occupation with Afghanistan. By my reckoning, within the Government of Canada the Afghanistan file functioned somewhat like a malignant disease. With by far the most attractive terms and conditions on offer, the seductive rewards of service proved a gift for ambitious careerists in the bureaucracy. The past decade, moreover, has been near bliss for those keen to acquire new military kit and to restructure the Canadian Forces away from peacekeeping and in the direction of expeditionary war fighting.

The impact on public policy and administration has been debilitating.

Within DFAIT, for instance, the Afghan Task Force and two new missions in Afghanistan siphoned large-scale human and financial resources away from other critical areas. In an environment of scarcity, this set back the government’s capacity to address effectively a host of pressing threats and challenges, especially the sprawling suite of transnational issues rooted in science and driven by technology. These range from climate change and diminishing biodiversity to resource scarcity and conservation of the global commons.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

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The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.